Tata lights up 40G on its New York to Europe subsea cable route

Seeing ongoing growth on its East Coast to UK subsea cable link, Tata Communications (NYSE: TCL) has lit 40 Gbps-enabled services on New York to London route of its Tata Global Network-Atlantic (TGN-Atlantic) subsea cable system.

Following the New York to London route, Tata will upgrade its routes to 40G in Ashburn, Va. and the rest of Europe.

To make this move, Tata is using Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform with 40G/100G coherent technology, which it settled on after conducting tests with a number of traditional subsea and terrestrial network vendors.

Matthew Ma, Vice President for Ethernet & Transmissions Engineering at Tata Communications, said in an interview with FierceTelecom that the upgrade is in response to the need to keep up with the "tremendous growth we are seeing on the East Coast to London and onto the rest of Europe."

With network equipment and testing already complete, Tata has placed a few customers on the upgraded route. The 40G design capacity of the system is now 2.5 Tbps.

While the focus today is on 40G, Ma said Tata has set a path to move to 100G as traffic demands dictate. "We have done other field trials to ensure we can carry faster rates of 100G on the same platform," he said.

In moving to 100G, the service provider will leverage emerging soft decision forward error correction (FEC) technique that are necessary for longer distance 100G transmission.

"Coherent detection is already available, but what's missing is soft decision technology, which should be available next year," Ma said. "By the end of next year we'll have faster speed on the same platform, but we're waiting for that one more technology advancement."

It appears that Tata's move is coming at the right time. New reports from TeleGeography forecast that the demand for trans-Atlantic capacity will increase almost nine-fold between 2010 and 2017.